A Model-Driven Aspect Framework for Grid Service Development

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) plays an important role in the next generation computing models for scientific and commercial applications. But difficulties in the development and maintenance of grid services slow down the spread of service-based applications. A model-driven aspect framework (MDAF) is proposed in this paper to facilitate the development of grid services, which benefits from the combination of model-driven architecture and Aspect-oriented programming. The UML output in XMI format derived from a CASE tool is used as the input of the framework to generate a suite of source code files and related settings. The design and implementation of MDAF are built on AspectJ along with several open source toolkits, including Eclipse, Velocity and Ant. Finally a case study of a full text search application developed with MDAF is presented to demonstrate the advantages of grid service development with MDAF. MDAF enables a better separation of business logic and grid specific details at both model and code levels, which makes it easy to develop, test and maintain Grid service based applications